As more marketing moves from off-line to online distribution channels, there are a number of outlets that can help generate traffic to a company’s website and increase brand awareness. In order to get the most benefit from their online efforts, companies need to understand where their customers look for information about their services or products and then provide valuable content on those sites.

By placing content on external sites, companies can reach their target audience and maybe even get their content ranked in search engines for specific keyword phrases. This, in turn, will help increase brand exposure and drive more traffic to the site.

Slideshare is a content site that has a lot of potential to increase exposure and send targeted traffic to a company’s site. Slideshare is a popular platform for uploading and sharing PowerPoint presentations, and you can start building traffic to your site by using these four tactics:

Tip #1- Optimize Each Presentation

When you upload a new presentation to Slideshare you should create a title, description and tag your PPT presentation. Make sure you use keywords in each of these fields. For example:

It is a good idea to “Allow viewers to download file” as well. That way Slideshare can track how many times an individual saves or downloads your presentation.

Tip #2- Use Keywords Throughout the Presentation

Once they’re uploaded, Slideshare creates a transcript of the slides which appears below the presentation. Google and other search engines can crawl and index the transcript and create an association (via co-citations) between certain keywords and your brand. Pratik Dholakiya explained co-citations as:

“Google is placing less emphasis on anchor text (and perhaps links in general), and is leveraging its massive data set to look for statistical correlations that it can use to determine relevance and influence on the web.”

For more information about co-citations, you can check out Pratik’s article on Search Engine Journal.

Tip #3- Promote Your Presentation

After you upload your presentation to Slideshare, spend some time on sites like Quora or LinkedIn Groups to promote your content. Chances are you have answered someone’s questions with the information in your slides, so this is an opportunity to link to your presentation.

EX.

When looking on Quora for the phrase “create images using PowerPoint,” I came across the following opportunity:

This simple question provided great opportunity to build links naturally to the following presentation:

Find relevant places to link to your Slideshare presentation and you will be able to increase the amount of views to your slides. Further, you should also promote your presentation on social sites. Social sharing like Tweets, shares, likes and +1s can also increase the amount of views to your slides.

This will, in turn, increase your chances of being featured on the homepage of Slideshare:

Image source: slideshare.net

Slideshare features 16 presentations on a given day. While two of the featured presentations are paid listings the other 14 are editorial picks, and one of the criteria Slideshare uses to select which content to feature is the highest number of views in a given day.

Promoting your presentation through link building and social promotions can increase the amount of views to your presentation substantially, which in turn increases your chances of showing up in the featured section of the homepage.

Link building, social shares and additional views helped SEO.com increase views to the following presentation:

 Tip #4- Begin with the End in Mind

Like any piece of content you produce it should have a purpose. If you define that purpose upfront it will be that much easier to create an effective strategy. Before building out a Slideshare presentation you should have a keyword phrase in mind so you can easily optimize the presentation (that is keyword rich), create value, and promote it through link building and social channels.

By taking advantage of the tips above, you can drive valuable traffic back to your site and possibly even rank your presentation in search engines for key phrases. A well-thought-out SlideShare presentation may be easier to rank rather than your own blog since it gets to use SlideShare’s domain authority. Sometimes, though, there are just certain topics that are best covered with a visual presentation instead of blog post.

I would love to hear how you are using Slideshare for your online marketing efforts.

4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

On-page SEO has become an even bigger ranking factor since the first Panda update that was launched back on February 23, 2011. Since then, there have been twenty four known Panda updates or versions that have rolled out. Each update has the same purpose which, according to Google, is “to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible.”

Understanding Google’s purpose should give website owners insights into how they can build a site that will help Google and other search engines see why their site is relevant for certain search queries. In order to help webmasters even more, Google has given guidance on how to build a quality site wherein they list a series of questions that help define what a “quality site” is. A few key questions you may want to ask yourself include:

• Does my site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Do my pages provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? (Perform competitive analysis on your competitors’ content)
• Would I expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are my pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

You still might be asking yourself, “that’s great, but how do I optimize my page so that Google finds it relevant for key phrases?” Or “How should I optimize my title tag, description, header tags, content and other page elements for SEO purposes?”

In order to understand what search engines are trying to do with your on-page SEO it might help to understand what has changed over the years. Looking at on-page elements over the years is very telling of things to come. Here is a brief history of site optimizations.

History of Site Optimizations Tactics

Keyword Meta Tags

This tag was used early on in search to help search engines understand what the webpage was about. Danny Sullivan first reported the death of the keyword meta tag back in 2002 and it wasn’t until 2009 that Google announced that the tag is no longer considered a ranking factor. While majority of sites no longer have keyword meta tags in the source code of the site, I still see it being used.

TAKEAWAY: Because it is not a ranking factor it is best to delete the tag since it just shows your competitors what keywords you are targeting.

Description Meta Tag

Much like the keyword meta tag, the description tag was used early on to help search engines know what the page is about. In 2009 Google announced that this tag is no longer considered a ranking factor. While this tag is not considered a ranking factor, the description tag is still very useful because it can help improve click-through rate through the additional information it provides to users from the search engine result page.

TAKEAWAY: Description tags should include keyword phrases to help users understand how and if your site is relevant to a search query. However, make sure the description tag supports the content on the page. If Google feels like your description tag is not relevant to the page content then they will most likely replace the description tag with more relevant content from the page.

Title Element

The page title is still a very important on-page element to help search engines know what the page is about. While they are still useful, over the years individuals have noticed that the title tag being displayed in search results doesn’t always conform to the typical 70 character limit. Instead, title tags are being cut off or adjusted if Google feels like the title does not describe what the page is about.

Google has been playing around with title tags for years however, only until recently did Google explained to Barry Schwartz a few reasons why this might be happening:

(1) titles are particularly short, (2) titles are shared across large parts of your site and/or (3) titles appear to be mostly a collection of keywords.

The example below is a site that is ranking on page one of Google search results for the keyword “epoxy flooring.” The title tag is extremely long.

Actual Title Tag:

How to Epoxy-Coat a Garage Floor  | Step-by-Step | Garage How-To  | Exterior  | This Old House – Introduction

Adjusted Title Tag that is being displayed for the search results page:

While the title tag is still one of the more important page elements for incorporating keywords, it will most likely become less and less of a ranking factor as search engines rely more heavily on other page elements to create an association between keywords and a given website.

TAKEAWAY: Don’t focus on getting the keywords in the title 2-3 times but focus on user engagement. Give users a reason to click on your listing.

Heading Tags

There is a lot of debate in the SEO industry on how much H1s help a site to rank organically. While the benefits are not like they were a few years ago, they still provide some value. Make sure to optimize your H1 tags so that they include keywords and make sure you only have one H1 tag per page. Other section headings and dividers should be made into <H2>, <H3>, or <H4> tags, and these should preferably go from largest physical font size to smallest on the page.

Images

There should be an alt attribute on every image on the page. It should be relevant to the image and include the page’s keywords where possible. This is a newer and important influence on rankings.

Looking at the past it is easy to see that Google and other search engines focus was primarily on meta data, at least from an on-page perspective While these factors are still important and should be implemented site-wide, there are so many other things that site owners should be aware of.

Important Ranking Factors in 2013 and Moving Forward

Content

Google has always been a fan of content however; even content as we know it has changed with the Panda updates. In a recent article by Matt McGee he stated,

The impact on some of the sites that Panda hit goes well beyond rankings and search traffic. It’s forced some companies to change names, change business models, fire employees and even to go out of business altogether.

In the article, Matt references a number of sites that, prior to Panda, had numerous articles that were driving a ton of traffic to their site. Fast forwarding two years, many of them are still feeling the effects of Panda as shown in his traffic trend image from Visibility.

Source: http://searchengineland.com

One thing these algorithm updates have shown us is just how much Google cares about high quality content. Businesses should implement a content strategy moving forward however, they need to be careful what that content looks like. Make sure to produce high-quality articles.

Businesses should be using content as part of their marketing plan. It is usually best to put together a content calendar to help in this process. From there, businesses should be actively putting together inbound marketing materials such as eBooks, blog posts, webinars, whitepapers, videos, infographics and other resources that increase user engagement and help to establish authority for the brand.

Social Sharing/Signals

Social sharing has become an important ranking factor as of late. Encouraging users to like, +1, tweet and share information on your site helps search engines understand the value you are providing to users.

One way to do this is by using content marketing methods that were mentioned above. If a business is generating valuable resources on a regular basis, users are likely to share that information with their social networks. Site owners should be looking at ways to encourage social engagement. This will have an even bigger impact on search results moving forward.

Author Rank

Since the inception of Google+ on Jun 28, 2011, author rank has played a role in search rankings. Authors are able to mark up there content using rel=“author” tags so their image shows up next to the content they create.

This has impacted the search results in a big way.

As explained by Google, “The name of the writer can be used to influence the ranking of web search results by indicating the writer responsible for a particular content piece…”

Anyone publishing content on your site should be implementing rel= author markup as part of their inbound marketing strategy.

For additional insights into using rel=“author” you can check out this awesome post about authorship by Brian Jensen.

Site Speed

Site speed was introduced as a ranking factor back in April of 2010 and website owners are still focusing heavily on other ranking factors. There are a number of minor changes that can be made to a site to speed up load times. Some of these include:

• Minimizing the amount of bytes associated with images. There are a bunch of free editing software tools to help developers reduce the image file size without losing image quality. Another option is to use tools such as http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/ to speed up the process.
• Installing the page speed extension for Chrome for additional insights for improving website performance.
• Using a CDN (content delivery network).

Schema Markup

Schema markup is used by Google, Bing and Yahoo to better understand information on a webpage. Webmasters are able to markup certain an element on the website by using additional HTML tags. The HTML tags help search engines know what should be included in the search results. For example, event based search queries such as Imagine Dragons concert tickets have details that can be useful to display in the search results. These details could include tour dates, venues, concert ratings and other information.

Schema markup can be used for:

• Local Businesses
• People
• Products
• Reviews
• Videos, etc.

Webmasters should look for ways to implement schema markup as this is becoming a bigger factor in search rankings.

Intuitive Navigation

It is important to understand what your users are looking for when they get to your site. Google is using site metrics (like bounce rate, time on site, page views and others) to help them understand if your site provides a good user experience. If users get to your site from a given search query and shortly after get frustrated and leave or bounce due to poor navigation then that can have negative effects on your ranking. There are still a lot of unknowns as to how much this can affect sites rankings however, this is the direction search engines are moving.

Over the years Google and other search engines are have been moving away from meta tags, alt attributes and other on-page elements and moving more toward user based ranking factors. There are a number of other things website owners can be implementing on their site to positively affect search rankings.

Website owners need to look closely at their site and ask themselves a few things:

• Does my site offer useful information about my products or services?
• Are users able to quickly find what they need on my site?
• How does my site compare to the competition?
• What can I do to provide a better user experience?

This is the direction Google and other search engines are moving so it is important for businesses to understand their target audience and give users what they want faster than the competition. Implementing these tactics will have a measurable impact on your SEO efforts.

On-Page SEO: Past, Present & Future is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Discussing SEO with clients is no easy task but educating them about what is required to get them rankings is extremely important in order to set the right expectations. Individuals working in SEO must understand how Google and other search engines crawl, index and rank websites to be able to educate the client accordingly.

It is hard to know how difficult achieving rankings with a new search engine optimization project will be because so many factors play into it and Google is always adjusting its algorithm. By understanding search engines you can help clients understand how difficult an SEO’s job is at times.

So how does Google’s algorithm work?

The Anatomy of a Search Engine:

This is a basic breakdown of a much more complex process.

• A URL Server sends over lists of URLs to be crawled.
• The crawlers download the web pages then send them to the store server. The store server compresses and stores the web pages.
• Every web page is given an associated ID number called a docID then sent to the indexer.
• The indexing function is performed by the indexer and the sorter.
• All of the documents (webpages) are converted into a set of word occurrences called hits. Each hit records the word, position in document and other variables.
• The indexer sends these hits into a set of “buckets”, creating a partial index.
• The indexer separates out all of the links in every web page and keeps important information about them in another file. This file contains information about where each link points from and to, and the text of the link.
• The links database is used to compute PageRanks for all the documents. The sorter takes the barrels, which are sorted by docID…., and resorts them by wordID to generate the inverted index…… The searcher is run by a web server and uses the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

A much more in depth process of this can be found at - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

In laymen’s terms this is what it happens:

Say someone is looking for information about blu ray players. Google takes the billions of documents on the web and converts them into wordID’s. Then it looks for instances or patterns of the wordID’s across all of the documents and ranks the documents based on how often the wordID’s appear. For example,

Blu ray player

Based off of the table above you can see that document 134 shows up in every document making it the most relevant and thus potentially ranking very high in the search results. Google has to sort through millions of documents on the web that could be talking about Ray-Ban glasses that are blue, blue ray jackets, Tampa Devil Rays jerseys that are blue, Devil Ray players, Blue Apple players and so on. In addition to looking for wordID’s, links and other on-pages factors are taken into consideration when trying to rank a site. This gets very complex really quick.

Key Takeaway: Google has to create an “association” or see that your site is relevant for a given keyword out of billions of documents. That association could take months if not years to create and it becomes even more difficult to create as you move closer to the top 10 results. *We know Google has around 200 ranking factors so it would be a good idea for a client to implement as many on-page elements as possible, to send a clear message to Google as to what the page is about, since on-page elements tend to be easier to control then the link building aspect.

Knowing the basic process is good but how much information does Google have to sort through in order to find the most relevant webpage for a search query?

What Does It Take To Get a List of Results?

• More than 1 million computing hours have gone into preparing Google’s index
• More than 1 billion searches are performed on Google every day
• More than 1,000 man years have been spent on developing Google’s algorithm
• Google’s Caffeine index contains over 100 million gigabytes
• In July of 2008 Google processed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs. What does that equate to: That is the equivalent of, “fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.” Google computes this every day.
• Google’s database of indexed pages is 5 million terabytes – A stack of DVDs holding Google’s index would be as tall as 3,192 Empire State buildings.

This is the task of an SEO, to try and help Google effectively sort through all of the web pages and then to help a client rank for a certain search query. This is why it takes time to potentially rank for a given keyword. As SEO’s optimize pages and build links Google is sorting through the tremendous amounts of data every day in order to better understand which pages should rank in the top positions.

As you can see a lot of time and energy has been spent by Google in order to bring back relevant results to users. It does not stop there. Since new web pages are being created daily, Google has to keep up with all of this new information. Because of that Google and other search engines need to be efficient and effective in how they manage all of this information.

Google is Always Changing

Even if a client has everything in place and is able to get to the first page of the search results, Google is always changing and tweaking its algorithm so it is an uphill battle.

Google made over 500 changes to their algorithm last year and Matt Cutts has stated,

Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites……This change is just one of the over 500 improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.

The news came on January 19th when Google announced another algorithm change.

While the majority of these changes are small, a number of big changes took place last year that affected nearly 50% of all search queries.

For an up to date timeline of Google’s changes over the years check out SEOmoz.org. Since Google is always changing the way they rank sites it makes an SEO’s job that much more difficult. Keeping up to date on the latest changes and industry news is never ending for an SEO.

Obviously there are many more factors to consider when getting into an SEO campaign but I have found that helping clients recognize how much work it takes to get sites to rank can improve the overall relationship in a positive way.

Stats above can be found at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/underthehood.html

http://adam-thompson.me/2011/02/03/google-how-big/

So You Want to Rank In Google? is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

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It can be difficult to track the exact position of keywords in Google since a number of things can affect the outcome. Personalized search, local results, and different data centers can all dramatically influence the rankings you see. Google’s algorithm changes more than 200 times a year, so rankings also fluctuate from week to week or day to day. Overall, you should be looking for trends in your rankings.

With that in mind there are numerous tools that can help you track rankings. One way to track rankings is to use filters within Google Analytics. More information about this is available on Yoast’s blog.

This information can also be gathered through Google Webmaster Tools. In your Webmaster tools click on “Your Site on the Web” and then on “Search Queries.” This will give you the average position on Google for your site for a given term.

Paid options also exist that allow you to track very specific terms. Rank Tracker is a paid option that automatically checks your search engine rankings and shows you if your site has moved up or down in the search results. It can also help you discover profitable keywords you may not have considered on your own.

The SEO Moz tool is another good option that will track rankings from Google, Bing and Yahoo in any country. This tool pulls rankings automatically and provides some nice charts to show progress.

Authority Labs in another paid tool that provides fully automated reports, allowing you to track local results, international keywords, and a large volume of keywords.

Advanced Web Ranking and Rank Checker are additional services that can be useful for tracking web rankings.

There are a lot of good ways to track search engine rankings. If you have additional SEO services or tools that you like to use for tracking rankings, feel free to leave a comment.

How Can I Track my SEO Rankings? [Video FAQ Series] is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

You would think search engines are like an “equal opportunity employer.” That everyone has has the same chance to get ranked for certain keywords by taking advantage of on-page and off-page techniques, which include some of the following:

Theoretically speaking, my competition could match my site in each of these categories. For example, if I build a high-quality link, my competition can do the same. If I optimize my title tags, H1 tags, content, and other on-page elements, then my competition can essentially do the same.

In essence, they can match me link-for-link, quality content for quality content, title tag for title tag and everything else I am doing to ensure they rank just as good, if not better than I do.

However, one thing they cannot do is match the domain name of my site. Having a great domain name is an exception, and Google and other search engines place a lot of emphasis on keyword rich domains.

This is where Google and others have shown some biases toward websites. How is it that search engines are biased? Unfortunately, search engines use highly complex algorithms to find and display the results you and I see, and with any computer-run system, you can find a way to manipulate it.

For example, look at the search results for “online universities,” a keyword in a known ultra-competitive industry.

The first three results are for www.onlineuniversities.com followed by a mix of .com and .edu websites. This might look good on the surface, but looking deeper into why these sites are ranking revealed some interesting results. I only looked at .edu sites to get an idea of why they are not ranking in the top spots since it would be natural to think an .edu should show up before a .com.

Onlineuniversities.com has a small amount of Open Site Explorer and Google links compared to the rest of the competition for this term. In addition to having a lot fewer back-links, there is a huge discrepancy between their number of .edu and .gov links compared with the competition.

So how is it that Onlineuniversities.com is out ranking four .edu sites, which are highly relevant to the search term “online universities”?

I attribute a lot of this to the domain name. There are other reasons keyword domains and SEO go hand in hand such as:

• Credibility – A keyword specific domain looks more trustworthy to search engines and to individuals linking to the site.  If someone has a business selling widgets and their website domain is widgets.com, search engines and individuals have a good idea what the purpose of the site is.
• Anchor text links – External links to a keyword domain include that specific keyword in the link because that is the company name. This is a great way to get keyword anchor text links from directories like Yahoo, Business.com, and Best of the Web. These directories don’t allow keywords to be used in the title when submitting a listing. They only want the business name however; if the name of your business online is keyword rich there is a good chance you will get listed in these types of directories.
• User-friendly – Keyword domain names are easier to remember then other domains. From a user perspective, they are more likely to remember widgets.com then reverbnation.com which is actually a site that shows up for the term widgets.

Individuals in the SEO industry would argue that Google is placing less emphasis on keyword rich domains, but I feel like they still place a fair amount of weight on these types of domains. This is a great strategy to incorporate with your SEO efforts and one that creates a core competency for a business. In every niche, you will find keyword rich domains and that is why businesses are looking to use a keyword domain to their advantage.

Why Google Favors Keyword Rich Domains is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Since my last post was about using the best keyword research tools, I thought I would go into more detail about one of my favorite keyword research tools, Market Samurai, and how you can bury your competition by using it. Market Samurai uses Google’s API as its main source of keyword data, but it also does some pretty unique things while also adding some incredibly useful features.

Like most keyword tools you start with your seed keyword and it will pull up similar keywords along with their data. As the snapshot below illustrates, I’ve done a search for “snowboards.” In Utah, we’re gearing up for snowboard season. And as you can see there is a whole host of custom filters that make finding the right keyword super easy.

As you can see, the first section of filters is specifically for organic search. There are a number of ways we can refine our search. (For the sake of this post I will highlight a few key functions.)

You can uncheck Organic to not filter by any organic search parameters.

Total search is precisely what you might think it is, but Market Samurai displays daily search volume, not monthly search volume. You can select the minimum or maximum search volume as a filter.

SEO Traffic filter is extremely useful for gauging the SEO value of a keyword. Market Samurai displays the potential daily clicks you would obtain for showing up first in Google. This is calculated by assuming that around 40% of users click on the #1 ranking in Google and so 40% of the total click volume is calculated accordingly.

The next section is dedicated to Adwords. This makes finding potential profitable keywords really simple. Market Samurai projects Adwords Traffic (AWT), Adwords CTR (AWCTR), and Adwords CPC (AWCPC). AWT estimates the total daily clicks the advertiser might receive from being in the top spot. AWCTR is the projected click-through rate for a decent ad. AWCPC shows you what the top advertiser pays for being there.

So, not only can you perform your keyword research, but you are able to find potential PPC keywords as well. After looking at trends and finding some possible PPC campaigns you can also see the commerciality or seasonality of keywords easily.

Adwords Value (AWV) is an arbitrary number that projects potential income a site could bring in per day with that keyword.

With the filters selected and one click, your data is updated and can preview the information displayed in a nicely organized table.  For example:

SEO Competition

Once the keyword research is done and you’ve selected your bread and butter keyword, it’s time to figure out if that keyword is viable for SEO. That means you legally spy on your competition.

Just click on the SEO COMPETITION feature and within seconds you can see the top 10 competitors for the keyword you selected.

This is a HUGE time saver. You can quickly check back-links in Yahoo Site Explorer, see if they are indexed in major directories, the domain age, page rank, keywords in title, keywords in URL, keywords in description, keywords in h1 tag and cache date.

This is an easy way to find the lowest hanging fruit in your marketplace. Finding keywords with less competition is quick and painless.

With keyword research done and a quick look at the competition, why not check your website rankings for some or all of your keywords? From the keyword research conducted, you can now go down the list and check the boxes of some or all of the keywords you want to check rankings for. When you are finished checking your keywords, select the drop down box at the bottom. From there you can select “Add to Rank Tracker” and Market Samurai will transfer your keywords to the rank tracker.

Rank Checker

After transferring your keywords into the rank tracker, you can add the URL you are working with and run a quick report. Preview an example of the report below.

I could keep going on with all of the features, but I think you get the point. Market Samurai is a great tool to find targeted keywords and hidden niches. You’ll spend less time doing research and more time making money. Isn’t that what we all want? You can see below, there are a lot more options I could have discussed such as monetization, finding content, publishing content and even promotion.

Market Samurai is one of my favorite tools that I use every day. Start using it and you’ll instantly save time and you might even make a little extra cash this year.

Keyword Research Tool Exposed: Bury the Competition is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Conducting keyword research can be a bit of a challenge if you aren’t using the right tools. When you conduct a search for “keyword research tools,” you’ll come across so many choices it can be hard to choose just one. So what are some strong keyword research tools available today? I’ve come across a few that seem to be effective.

Aaah, Google AdWords. This is probably one of the more popular tools out there, and all of you SEO experts are familiar with how it works, or at least should be. So what other tools are useful for keyword research?

Let’s take a look at a few.

Google’s SK tool works really well for generating niche keyword ideas. When you get to the SK tool page, click on the link, “Or see top keywords across all categories.”

Now it will display a list of categories for this search. From there, you can search through a various categories such as health, food, computers, travel & tourism, and more.

Let’s click on Sports & Fitness. Now, if I click on the Boating & Water Recreation, it will pull up a list of ideas and corresponding monthly search volume.

From here, you can find some great ideas for niche marketing. This tool can be useful for finding long-tail keyword ideas as well. To do this, simply do a search for a keyword (such as ski boats) and it will generate a list of long-tail keyword suggestions.

Additional Free tools for keyword research include:

• Wordtracker – Can help you compile associated keywords.  A more robust, paid version is also available.
• Keyword Discovery – Free version of the keyword research tool from Trellian.
• Spacky.com- Generates a monthly search volume for a given keyword.
• Seo Book Keyword Research- As stated on their site, “The Coolest Keyword Research Tool Today!”
• Keyword Spy- A site that allows you to spy on your competition and find their keywords.

Paid Subscription Tools

If you’re looking for added features, some good tools to check out:

• Spyfu.com- This is a great way to spy on the competition. They provide a Keyword Smart Search generates keyword ideas based on what the competition is doing. You can use some of their basic tools by creating an account, but in order to get the most out of it, you have to subscribe for a membership. 
• KeyCompete.com- KeyCompete is a keyword research tool that recognizes the keywords your competitors use in their pay-per-click campaigns and also reveals the competition that is bidding on your keywords.
• Wordze.com- Facilitates finding niche markets and locates market growth.
• Adgooroo.com- Helps you to get more traffic by finding traffic opportunities, PPC monitoring, and more.
• Nichebot.com- According to their ad, it’s “keyword research on steroids.”

The best tool that I am utilizing is Market Samurai. This tool is amazing! Really. I’ve been using it for the past month or so, and it makes keyword research so simple. In addition to keyword research, it provides tools like a rank tracker, finding content, and analyzing the competition. If you don’t want to pay for it right away you can download a free trial version for 12 days.

Have you found other tools useful when conducting keyword research? If so, I would love to hear about them.

Top Keyword Research Tools is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Bloggers have been plagued with spam for as long as they have been around. But even before blogs, spammers were wreaking havoc for website owners. Many of you are familiar with the history before blogging; but for those of you who are not, here is a brief run down.

Back in the early 2000’s, prior to the infestation of blogs, the web was full of guest books. Guest books gave owners interaction with those that visited their site by allowing visitors the opportunity to post a message and other information. Spammers soon realized the guest books weren’t being monitored, and began placing links in order to generate traffic to their sites. This became such a problem that Google and other search engines began looking for a solution. Shortly after guest books appeared, blogs arrived which brings us to where we are today. Unfortunately, the spam tactics on guest books are now being used on blogs. I did a search for scuba diving comments and found this example:

The anchor text link goes to a weight loss website. With spammers inundating blogs, similar to the example above, it was even more important for search engines to find a solution. Back in 2005, Google introduced their Nofollow attribute to the world of blogging in order to combat spam. The nofollow tag has been added to numerous social media sites such as Blogger, WordPress, Modblog, Technorati, and others in an attempt to reduce spam. Now comments posted on these and other sites look like:

Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">keyword </a> site

as opposed to the normal:

Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/">keyword</a> site.

This ensures that page rank from a credible site is not passed to a non-relevant and often non-credible site. This is a nice feature for those that do not monitor their blog comments, and it prevents spammers from taking the link juice to their site. However, a major problem with nofollow is that website owners try to persuade others to participate and make comments on their blogs. The users that participate frequently and give valuable feedback should be rewarded for their efforts, and rightfully so. That reward should come by way of links to the sites they reference in their comments.

There are tools available in order to remove the Nofollow attribute such as the plugin I found for wordpress. You can set a limit on the amount of comments a person has to leave before dofollow feature kicks in.

The fight against spam will always be around, but hopefully you will find yourself on the winning end. The best thing to do, is to monitor your blog comments and filter them. It’s better for everyone.

To Follow or to Nofollow… is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I always look forward to opening day of the Major League Baseball season, and Sunday April 5th, it finally came. The Atlanta Braves traveled to Philadelphia to take on the reigning World Series champs, the Phillies, on their home turf. Feeling confident because of last year’s World Series victory, I’m sure the Phillies expected to take care of the Braves with little to no problem. However, Derek Lowe dominated the mound for Atlanta and pitched eight, that’s right, eight shutout innings against the heavy hitting Phillies. Lowe only gave up two hits through eight innings and ended the night with four strikeouts. When all was said and done, Lowe had kept the Phillies in check and led his team to an opening day road victory and a big time upset.

It will be interesting to see who the dominating pitchers will be as the season moves on. Granted, who the dominating pitcher is this season doesn’t really have much to do with SEO, but it did get me thinking about what search engines are dominating in the so-called “Search Engine World Series.” So, I started doing a little research. My question: “Who is the top search engine in the top internet-providing markets across the world?”

Here are some things I found in my search for the top search engines (information found from cia.gov):

Number of internet users by country:

1. China: 253 million
2. US: 223 million
3. Japan: 88.1 million
4. India: 88 million
5. Brazil: 50 million
6. Germany: 42.5 million
7. UK: 40.2 million
8. South Korea: 35.5
9. Italy: 35.5 million
10. France: 31.2 million

With so many Internet users across the world, here is a quick look at the top four internet-usage countries to show you who is dominating the search engine market share in those countries.

China: Google takes a back seat to Baidu.com, which has the largest market share. Although some say Google.com.cn is still the best search engine in China, Baidu is still used more. China’s search engines generate approximately 19 billion searches per month.

United States: Google dominates the United States market with 72% share, which is phenomenal. Followed by Yahoo, and then MSN/Live. In terms of search volume, the US searches approximately 12 billion times per month on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Japan: Yahoo (51% market share) is still the king with over 3 billion searches a month. Google ranks second and in third is www.rakuten.co.jp (2% market share).

India: In the second most populous country, users prefer Google which represents 81% of the market. Yahoo comes in second with 9.4%, followed by Ask (1.9 percent) and MSN (1.7 percent). India’s own Rediff.com ranked fifth with 1.5% market share

More information on search engine market share and volume can be found through comscore.com, HitWise, and Alexa.com.

The Search Engine World Series is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.